The Collected Letters, Volume 16

No! I would not alter you even to the extent of introducing a new letter into your name! As the Duke of Wellington “found
the English Constitution so perfect that he should despair of making any improvement on it.”1—the ‘e’ was a quite “unconst[itu]ion[al]”2 piece of presumption on my part—

For the rest, will you come here on Friday evening?—the Mackintoshes have offered themselves for “any evening this week” and
I have just written to them appointing Friday3—deferring “the good the Gods have provided me”4 thus long to give myself the better chance of having it increased by a provision of my own viz: you—

1. The Duke of Wellington had said to the House of Lords, 2 Nov. 1830, that he “was fully convinced that the country possessed at the present moment a legislature which answered all the good
purposes of legislation, and this to a greater degree than any legislature ever had answered in any country whatever (laughter on the left of the house)” (Times, 4 Nov., 1830).